Friday, 17 June 2016

Yes It's Fucking Political: On the assassination of Jo Cox by the fascist Thomas Mair

They killed a
woman yesterday. By ‘they’ I mean the forces that seem to have been in control
of my country since long before the 2010 election. The forces that criticised
Gordon Brown for his penmanship in writing letters to dead soldiers’ families
but neglected to mention this was because he only has sight in one eye, and he
would rather have written his own signature on the letters than get an
underling to do it. Does anyone think Cameron really signs his own letters?
Does Cameron even have a signature? It seems unlikely, signatures are personal,
human things and it’s hard for him to hold the pen in his lizard fingers and keep up the pretense that he’s
human. Regardless, no paper runs articles criticising Cameron’s penmanship,
because the whole fuss about Brown’s handwriting was part of a deliberate,
sustained campaign of undermining the man and his government on the part of the
same papers that supported Cameron, in return for his collusion in their
corruption.

The same papers
that went big on Jeremy Clarkson, supporting him when he called Brown ‘a
one-eyed Scottish idiot’. The same papers that crucified him for calling a
bigot a bigot. The same papers that ran pictures of a Jew failing to eat a bacon
sandwich for a laugh last year then accused Labour of being anti-semitic. It’s
hard to write about. How to find the lyrics when it’s physically sickening just
living here these days, when our MPs are blown away by constituents insisting
that they shouldn’t vote remain?

When we look at
our body politic this time, will we see the actual cancer? Or will we insist
the racist posters and flotillas were just ‘banter’?

Fuck, I don’t know
how to write about this. I’m numb. Tragedy after tragedy after tragedy. This
murder coming so hot on the heels of Orlando, which came just as I was starting
to decompress after my suicide attempt, which was a result of the PTSD I’ve had
since last August and there are times when I feel that I just can’t cope. I
used to think to myself that it isn’t that
bad when people said things remind them of the 1930s, the rise of Hitler.
Now I’m not so sure. MPs are being gunned down in the street by people shouting
fascist slogans and when we point that out people accuse the witnesses of being
‘lying Muslims’, say it was a ‘false flag’ or accuse us of trying to ‘politicise’
a woman’s death. You cannot ‘politicise’
the murder of a left-wing MP by a fascist because such a murder is already political. It is a political murder. But it smarts to be
accused of trying to do so by people who cheerfully politicised a disabled man’s
penmanship.

This country is
sick. It feels like there’s no hope for it. People – not all people, but enough
people, predominantly in the South, the well-off counties – bought the lie that
it was poor people and refugees who caused the crisis, rather than the banks
the Tories wanted to protect, because it was a seductive lie: because it told
them that if those people were punished they would get some money back. Their
house prices would rise. They could buy things from Waitrose again (if they’d
ever had to stop). All they had to do was vote for a party which would demonise
the disabled, demonise Europe, demonise asylum-seekers, demonise the poor, and
then use that demonization to push through legislation making them poorer,
making it harder for them to live, making it harder for them to escape here
after we bomb the shit out of their countries to try and stop a cancer we
created by invading Iraq (it’s called blowback. Actual tacticians practically predicted that back in 2003, but they
were ignored because the Bush boy wanted to win his daddy’s war).

People voted,
twice, to take the basics away from the most vulnerable people in society
because they were told those people didn’t deserve it, instead those good,
striving middle class people deserved it, and the only way to get what they
deserved was to punish the people who’d taken it, the disabled ones, the brown
ones, the ones who weren’t queer in an acceptably heteronormative way and I AM
SORRY BUT FUCK GODWIN’S LAW at this
point. Godwin’s Law was funny back when everything seemed like a boozy lunch
with the debating society but things have got out of hand now and this is literally the fucking Nazi script,
attack the blacks, attack the crips, and blast the homos when they kiss, it’s this and if you’re so proud to call a
spade a spade then call this what it is: it’s a de facto fascist state, where white men will gun women down because
of racist hate and we blame it all on mental illness? Ignore the word of three
named witnesses who heard the man shout ‘Britain First!’, or ‘Put Britain
First!’ maybe, either way the sentiment’s the same. Britannia Nostra. But only
nostra for a certain value of nostra, which is not us. We don’t belong here anymore. That’s how it feels.

I watched Patrick
Keiller’s trilogy of Robinson films
again recently. Our broadband was out for ten days so, unable to retreat into
Netflix I went back to my DVDs. I’ve moved five times in the past couple of
years, and my collection has been thinned down each time I’ve moved but the Robinson films have stayed. In the first
one, Robinson and the unnamed narrator, voiced by Paul Schofield, witness the
shock Tory victory in the 1992 General Election. Robinson delivers a damning
moral verdict on the scene:

There were no mitigating circumstances; the
press, the voting system, the impropriety of Tory party funding. None of these
could explain away the fact that the middle class in England had continued to
vote Conservative because in their miserable hearts they still believed it was
in their interest to do so.

Their miserable
hearts. The miserable hearts that hurr-hurred along to a chino-wearing boor
mocking the Prime Minister’s disability, but call us callous when we point out
how cynically the Randroid currently running the country used his own disabled
son for photo opportunities to show how
much he really cared, even as he butchered the NHS to sell to his mates,
even as he made life in this country so intolerable for actual, living, less
photogenic disabled people. The miserable hearts which think house prices
matter more than bombed homes. The miserable hearts that lived through some of
the best times Britain had, much of that courtesy of the more than generous
subsidies we receive from the EU, but now want to leave that and pass on
decades of suffering to their children and grandchildren because you hear too many funny languages these days
and in some places you don’t see a
white face (this is bollocks, by the way – I’ve lived in ‘no-white-face’
places, I’ve worked in them, and there always are white people around. I mean, I’m there for a start. What people saying this mean is that there
are more black and brown faces around
than they’re comfortable with. Or, to put it another way, they’re racist.)

A friend of mine
just wrote this on her Facebook wall: ‘All empires rise and fall. Maybe it’s
time we fell.’

I’ve been watching
stuff with Gore Vidal in lately. Vidal was wrong on a few things, laughably
wrong about trans experience in Myra
Breckenridge and poisonously wrong about Roman Polanski and his victim, but
he was right about the big thing, which was America’s transformation, in his
lifetime, from a Republic to an Empire. He was a man who had to watch while the
country he knew, or thought he knew, became something meaner and uglier. I can
identify with that feeling a lot lately.

D’you remember
1997? D’you remember ‘Things Can Only Get Better’? We thought they would. We
thought we were a better society, that we’d never go back to the bad old days
of racism and homophobia, of queer and Paki-bashing, of black kids having to
run from the National Front on the way back from school. It was our rock and
roll utopia, the good guys had won and all that was left was to kick back,
spend our increased pay packets on alcopops and listen to Britpop.

Maybe the fact
that our utopia’s music and booze were so shitty should have been the first
sign that things couldn’t last. But we didn’t pay attention. The banks failed,
like Vince Cable said they would (and we can’t say that we weren’t given
warning. I was reading books suggesting
there would be a crash long before 2008. Do you know how long it takes a book
to get published? People knew what was coming for a while, some of them.) And
when they failed, instead of taking a long hard look at how we’d got here, at
how busted our political system had become, the middle classes of England, in
their miserable hearts, decided it was all the fault of queers and crips and
black and brown people.

Little Britain. Little fucking Britain. I feel like that
was the start of it: laugh at trans women, laugh at black women, laugh at poor
women, laugh at mentally ill women – funny how often women were the butt of the
joke on that show, isn’t it? Funny how the jokes aimed at male characters were
less vicious, often funnier and better constructed (the Pirate Memory Game
sketch, for example). Almost like when they were writing sketches about white
men Walliams and Lucas were able to treat them as people. Vicky Pollard, the
Kaiser fucking Chiefs singing about men in tracksuits attacking them because it’s
all getting ‘lairy’ and predicting a riot. There have been riots alright.

Rhian E. Jones’ ‘Clampdown’
is a very good book to read on that topic, by the way. It really nails what was
wrong with all that shit.

We’re a country
that loves to look the other way. At Amritsar, at the Bengal Famine, at what we
did in Ireland. At Section 28 and institutional racism. No-one wants to hear
about Section 28 when they’re admiring Diana on their commemorative plates.
No-one wants to talk about systemic racism when there’s a really funny Top Gear special on their television.

And people are
trying to get us to look the other way at Jo Cox’s murder. Well, fuck that. Jo Cox was murdered by a
fascist who read fascist publications and shouted the name of a fascist group
after murdering her. Jo Cox supported the rights of asylum-seekers and the campaign
to Remain. She was gunned down in cold blood because of her views. Because she
believed that Britain could be a country that welcomed refugees instead of
demonising them as migrants. She believed Britain could be a part of the world
instead of withdrawing behind the net curtains of Brexit and tutting at
continental goings-on. She believed, as she said in her maiden speech, that we
have more in common than what divides us, and we should unite to make a better
world instead of fighting over what’s left of the old one.

And she was
murdered for it.

People are saying
we shouldn’t politicise this. But when you murder someone for their political
views, it is already political. You
can’t hide that fact, you can’t obfuscate that fact, you can’t make it go away
and you can’t look away from it, not if you want to be honest about what this
country is.

Britain in 2016 is
a country where people are shot and stabbed for holding and expressing progressive
political views. For opposing racism and sectarianism. For believing we should
help the wretched of the Earth instead of building walls against them.

And in their
miserable hearts the middle classes of England, the Tory and UKIP voters, know
that is what this country has become, and they know they are responsible, and
because they don’t want to face that responsibility, because they don’t like to
think they have something in common with a murderer, they tell us not to ‘politicise’
it.

They tell us all
to do what we always do. To look away. To blame mental illness instead of the
political sickness of fascism.

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About AJ

AJ McKenna is a spoken word artist, but hopes to provoke you to disagree with her about that. Her poetry film 'A Letter to a Minnesota Prison' (commissioned by Apples & Snakes and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation)was shown at the South Bank Centre in 2013. In 2015 she premiered her one-woman show 'Howl of the Bantee' at the PBH Free Fringe in Edinburgh. A former Deputy Editor at So So Gay magazine, she now writes for Vada and Clarissa Explains Fuck All.